


The Lights of Kattegat

by nimblermortal



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Kid Fic, Season/Series 02 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 16:59:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2316872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Ragnar, children are not a weakness; they are everything. When he threatens someone else's children, he threatens his own idea of himself. Fortunately Lagertha is on hand, and there is a baby nearby whose father needs to be taught how to hold a child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Actual Story

Ragnar was not the same after the death of King Horik. It was not the murder; Ragnar refused to even speak of it as a violent death. From what she could gather from their long association and his words, Lagertha suspected he thought of Horik’s murder as a suicide; he who would kill children had already lost his own future.

What that meant for Ragnar, it was hard to say. He would not speak to her; or rather he would, but when he did, his hands were busy finding ways into some nook or crevice, seeking some distraction or illumination. He would smile at her, what looked like his old delighted, proud smile, but it lacked the conspiratorial jest of earlier times.

He was brooding, she knew that much, and it did not suit him; but even his sons could not stop him from climbing the hills and looking out over the land, all of which now belonged to him.

Lagertha did not go home. She did not trust Ragnar in this state. She watched Aslaug take care of the day-to-day functions of Kattegat, and watched her hope that Ragnar would be himself in time for the spring raiding season, and believe that this was just another one of Ragnar’s odd turns. At last, Lagertha took a horse and went to the place where the water fell and the ferns grew larger than anywhere else she knew. It was a magic place, and a holy one, and she did not think that Floki had chosen it for any other reason.

It was not Floki she was here to see. Lagertha was not comfortable being that close to the gods. She climbed up to his house, where she did not expect to find him at this time of day, and did not find him there. She found Helga instead, and a crying baby, and Helga crying with it.

“Are you all right?” she asked, and Helga turned sharply, wiping her face quickly with her hand. It did not, of course, help in the least. Lagertha politely ignored the trail of tears and snot. “Can I hold the baby while you cook?”

“Oh, please,” Helga said. “Come in.”

Lagertha shed her cloak and came, picked the baby up carefully and held it close as she rocked from side to side, bouncing sharply at the extreme ends of each swing. Soon enough, she stopped crying, leaving only Lagertha’s ears to ring.

“She’s a lovely baby,” Lagertha said, honestly appreciative, and already warded against the pang that reminded her of how lovely Gyda had been.

“Her name is Angrboda,” said Helga. Lagertha dropped a little more sharply in the middle of her bounce.

“That’s a… an uncommon name,” she said.

“Floki chose it.”

“Ah.” Lagertha bounced and swayed a bit longer, watching as Helga worked at preparing food. “She’s a good girl.”

“Most of the time,” said Helga, and then burst out, “How did you do it, Lagertha? I don’t sleep, I hardly get anything done, every time I set her down for a moment she cries…”

“I didn’t do it by myself,” Lagertha said. There had been a farmhand’s daughter who came to help, of course, but honestly she had had difficulty tearing her children out of Ragnar’s eager hands unless she convinced him to go hunting or raiding. It was he who had taught her how to bounce children, and he had been his happiest when Björn refused to sleep unless he had a tiny fist full of Ragnar’s chest hair.

“Floki will not come near her,” Helga said. “He is afraid.”

“And you are all alone out here,” Lagertha said.

“It is a long way to come for a visit,” Helga said, suddenly wary. Lagertha shrugged, hefting Angrboda a little higher.

“I will not lie to you,” she said. “I came for Angrboda. I have missed having a child to hold.”

“And?” Helga said, because she was Floki’s wife and would not miss when a truth had hidden its children behind it.

“I was hoping to take her back to Kattegat for a few days,” Lagertha said. “Now I am here, I think that will be good for you as well. She will be well cared for -“

“I know she will,” said Helga, “in your hands.”

Lagertha shrugged again. Angrboda, as light as a sword Lagertha might carry into battle, was a very different shape, and Lagertha was not used to carrying babies. Close though she might hold her, the baby kept slipping down, and Lagertha knew her arms would grow tired far sooner than they used to.

She missed holding babies. Perhaps Björn would give her one soon. Or, more likely, he would proudly present the child to his father, and expect Lagertha to go back to her keep in the mountains without a single child to ride beside her.

Enough of that talk. She would hold this baby while it was hers to hold.

“You do not have to let her go,” Lagertha said. “I ask as a friend, not as an earl.”

“I gladly let her go,” Helga said quickly. Lagertha said nothing, waiting for the rest of the words. “Really. I trust you. And I would like the sleep. Only… a few days is a very long time.”

“Would you like to come and fetch her when you are ready?” Lagertha asked. “Or shall I bring her back tomorrow? It is not such a long way to go.”

“If you would do that, I would be very grateful,” Helga said. Lagertha smiled and nodded, and put the baby to rest, and helped Helga with the meal. Helga, in her turn, helped Lagertha find the harness to hold the baby on her back before she settled down in the bed to sleep, dinner made, baby spoken for. Lagertha lingered in the doorway.

“I will leave tomorrow before noon,” she said. “You will have your daughter back by afternoon.”

“She will have plenty of milk?”

“Trust me,” Lagertha said. “She will be better cared for than you could dream.”

“I would not believe that from any other woman,” Helga said. “She likes -“

“Shhh,” said Lagertha. “Sleep. You must be ready for your husband when he comes home.”

And then she took the baby on her back and walked back to Kattegat.

 

“Is Ragnar home?” she asked when she got back to the main hall. Björn, who had come to meet her, gave her the long-suffering look he had used so often when he was twelve; she had forgotten the shape of it, in the years when he had not had Ragnar to coax it out of him.

“He’s gone up to the mountains again,” he said.

“Tell him to be quiet coming in or he’ll wake the baby,” Lagertha said. “That includes his stupid games with the arrows.”

She swept past the rest of the business being conducted, headed for the back rooms until Aslaug stepped into her path. “Baby?” Ragnar’s new wife demanded. The queen now, Lagertha supposed, and drew herself straighter under the weight of the baby’s sling.

“Yes. I brought Floki’s daughter for a visit,” Lagertha said. She could see Aslaug relax; Lagertha alone, perhaps, was no competition for Ragnar’s affections, but an unknown baby, Lagertha’s baby, that was a different story. Lagertha did not know how to tell her that she was getting old to be having babies, and there was no way it could be Ragnar’s. It was becoming a problem in Hedeby, where succession was by no means clear when Björn preferred to spend all his time with his father.

“A daughter?” Aslaug asked, her expression shifting. “May I hold her?”

So Aslaug helped Lagertha out of the sling, and held Angrboda as she slept, and ordered her women to pull fine clothes out of the trunk for little Angrboda - things Ivar had used, she said apologetically, but she did not have any fresh clothes to hand, nothing beautiful like a little girl ought to have.

“She’s not yet a year old,” Lagertha said. “She does not care what she wears.”

Aslaug fixed her with a cold look. “I care,” she said, and turned away from Lagertha.

There were too many old pains in Kattegat, Lagertha reflected. It would be good if Ragnar moved his seat, away from the shores where he had mourned for Gyda and she had… carried on, because one of them had to. Too many spaces to remember what it was like to have a daughter, to hold and to teach her and to speak with her, watch her grow into a person - too many faces like Aslaug’s, where the raw desire for a girl child was as strong as Lagertha remembered it.

She would have no more children; that was her own choice, because a jarl could not die in childbirth. She could not stay here and be reminded.

Across the hall, away from Aslaug, there was Siggy’s face to see, to catch a glimpse of the same jealousy Lagertha was sure was streaked like blood across her own. Lagertha went to invite her to have a bath; they had been friends, once, and they could wash the blood off their faces together, and talk about the daughters they had lost.

In the morning, when it was no longer time to talk of the dead, Ragnar came back. Of course he came back in the morning; death did not suit him, and it never had. Lagertha met his gaze easily from beside her horse, where she was checking that her things were carefully packed.

“You are leaving?” Ragnar asked. “Again?”

“For a while,” Lagertha said. “I must govern my own lands. I will come when you call me to your coronation.”

“Not until spring, then,” Ragnar said, his voice hollow. Lagertha swung up onto her horse and looked down at him. It was not her job to respond to that aching call for touch. Let his wife do that.

“Not until spring,” she agreed. “Will you do me a favor?”

“What is it?”

“I visited Helga yesterday and brought her daughter here with me,” Lagertha said. “I promised to return her today, but I find I must return home first. Will you take her back to her parents?”

“A baby!” Ragnar said. “A girl! What is her name?”

“Angrboda,” said Lagertha, watching his face.

“What a beautiful name,” Ragnar said, apparently with no touch of irony. “She will bring her parents much joy. Of course I will do this thing. Where is she?”

“With Aslaug,” Lagertha said. Ragnar nodded distractedly.

“Safe travels, then,” he said, and turned to Kattegat, to his family, the opposite direction of where Lagertha rode.

 

Angrboda, Ragnar decided, was the perfect age for a baby. Sweet docile, smiling - she had just mastered that trick of looking soulfully into your eyes as though you were the only thing that mattered. And she was old enough to stay awake long enough to play with.

He did, of course, have to take her back to Floki as soon as possible, since Lagertha had promised her mother that she would be returned some time that afternoon. He declined Aslaug’s offer of a sling, and his men’s offer of an escort; this would be a trip just for him and the baby girl, going to visit his old friend. Angrboda rode in Ragnar’s arms, or against his side, or giggling in the air just a couple of inches above his hands, a space Ragnar had carefully determined, from raising five sons and one daughter, was just right to make a baby laugh without allowing any chance that it would fall.

He walked slowly, because there was no reason to rush these things, not when children tired so easily, not when Ragnar’s arms were strong from weapons practice. He could make sure of every foothold so that he would not drop her; he could keep a steady hand under her neck even when she flew so that her little baby muscles would not strain.

Eventually, all babies, no matter how clever or happy, had to sleep, and so Ragnar sang it a little tune that Lagertha had taught him when they had their first child - when he had first fallen in love with eyes so big that there was no white to them, and he thought they had the eyes of the world serpent and he would drown in them.

“The only thing you do badly is sleep,” Ragnar said to the baby, quietly so it would not wake. If you knew, there was a trick to this, to murmuring in just such a low growl that the baby snuggled closer and slept deeply. Angrboda, he had found, was a restless sleeper, one who woke quickly if Ragnar moved too suddenly or stepped too hard. “I wonder what you will be when you grow up, eh? A clever boatbuilder like your father?” He tickled her gently under the chin, soft enough that she would not wake, then poked her little boneless nose the way he had poked Ivar’s in the forest. “A beautiful lady like your mother? No, you are far too frightful for that, too alert. You will be a brave warrior like your uncle Ragnar and your brother Björn.”

“She is not your baby.” Floki’s voice came echoing out of the woods, in its strange lilt, unearthly when you did not know the source. They had first become friends when Ragnar was not frightened when he did this.

He ignored Floki now, and made sure that Angrboda, buried in the blankets Aslaug had sent, was not waking from the strange new noises. Floki would come when he was ready.

“She is not your baby,” Floki repeated a moment later, appearing on the path in front of Ragnar.

“This is true,” Ragnar said, stepping around him and still not looking him in the face. There were few surer ways to make Floki angry, but what was one to do with a fussy baby who did  not sleep well? “She is her mother’s baby.”

“She is my daughter,” Floki said. “Angrboda. Her mother told me so.”

“I heard it was you who named her.”

“She is my daughter whoever sired her!” Floki snapped.

“How could it be otherwise?” Ragnar asked. “It is your wife who gave birth to her; she is your daughter.” A man should marry as often as his wives would allow, he thought, so that every baby they had would be his. And then he would often receive such gifts as the little rim of an ear peeking out from the blankets, asking for just a careful touch before it was tucked back in its wrappings as ward against the cold.

“Hm,” said Floki. He was walking with Ragnar now, checking his pace every few steps to match Ragnar’s unaccustomedly slow stride.

“Do you want to hold her?” Ragnar asked reluctantly.

“No!” Floki yelped, and then added, “You may keep her. I accept your offer of company on my way home.”

“You don’t want to hold her?” Ragnar asked, tearing his gaze away from the soft round cheeks nestled in the blanket.

“She is my daughter. I can hold her or not as I choose.”

“But you want to.”

“No.”

“It’s very easy. Look, all you have to remember is to support her head…”

“I know how to hold my daughter!”

“Then show me.” Ragnar had stopped moving, forcing Floki to stop as well. He made a slight offering gesture with his arms. Floki crossed his own arms. “Floki, this is your daughter. She will be the source of all joy in your life - not sorrow.”

Floki would not meet his eyes. “I never said that.”

“You named her Angrboda. At some point you have to accept that she is part of you. And any sorrow that she does bring - well, it will be the sweeter because she was there.”

“I know that.”

“Just because your children have hurt you before doesn’t mean you can stop trying,” Ragnar said, stepping a little closer. “Here - hold her head. Remember to support the neck.”

Floki, seeing how persistent Ragnar was being, held out his hands. Ragnar gently, reverently laid the baby in them. Floki, his legs spread in a fighting stance, stood paralyzed with the baby held in front of him as if he were presenting Ragnar with a sword.

“You see I can do it,” Floki said. “Take her back.”

“That is not holding a baby,” Ragnar said. “If you had not lied to Horik, if you had helped him kill me and stood over my body, would you hold me so? No? Then how much less do you value your own daughter, when she is still alive?”

He watched smugly as Floki reluctantly brought Angrboda closer to him, touching more and more of his body. Angrboda, of course, took the opportunity to wake up and voice her fury at being woken. Floki froze, his daughter suspended in the air, not able to leap back away from her. He stood still until Ragnar took the baby out of his hands and held it to his chest, swaying back and forth and muttering “And bounce… and bounce…” until Angrboda quietened, and not changing until he could peek back and sideways and see that she was sleeping again.

“You see what happens when I take her,” Floki said. “She does not like me.”

“She is a poor sleeper," Ragnar said. “You should take her so often so Helga can get some sleep, and does not have to send her baby across the mountain to be taken care of.”

“If she cries every time I touch her -“

“You just need practice,” Ragnar said. “You are a father now, you do not get to choose not to be. I will come and make sure you practice. Every day.”

“Every day?”

“Until you carry her, by yourself, all the way to Kattegat to see me,” Ragnar amended. “Every day until then.”

He could see the panic in Floki’s face turn to worry, his mind flicking over possibilities. Ragnar started down the path. He was not worried; if Floki found a way to defeat him, he would come up with something else.

“And we will be good friends,” he whispered to Angrboda. “You and me, and your father too. And maybe Aslaug will have a daughter just for you.”

Yes. A daughter would be good, another daughter amid all the sons. Ragnar missed having a daughter; he had forgotten how much joy they brought, remembered only to be jealous of Horik’s daughters.

“I will be a father for them,” he whispered to Angrboda, who spat a little in her sleep in response. “I will have daughters enough to replace them. A man who kills children kills his own future; but children are the future. And Horik’s will be reborn in my daughters.” He flipped her bottom lip and she waved a fist impotently.

“What are you saying to my child, Ragnar?” Floki demanded. Ragnar turned and beamed back at him.

“That I will have daughters, Floki. So many daughters.”

“Hm,” said Floki. “I will not hold any of them.”

“But you will hold your own,” said Ragnar. "And perhaps you will have more.”

Floki seemed horror-stricken at the thought. Ragnar smiled and started down the other side of the mountain, to where he could see the fire of Helga’s hearth and where he would find another man’s cradle to put the other man’s baby into. But it was a baby in Ragnar’s arms, and it could only be another man’s child for so long.

 


	2. Fostering Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not so much an epilogue as an "I am not yet completely sure how fostering worked in Scandinavia during this period, so this part needs a historical accuracy warning."
> 
> Although adding a historical accuracy warning to Vikings, of all things, is a bit overconscientious.

He walked back over the mountain that evening so that Floki and Helga could have the night alone. His arms felt lighter without a baby in them. It was not a lightness he had ever desired. The torches were beginning to be lit in Kattegat, and he paused for a while to look down on them from above and think of the lamps of England, to dream that one day Kattegat would have such treasures, and to consider the expense of glass. Then he walked down to see his sons and his wife.

Ubbe was standing closest to the door, so it was he who alerted the hall to Ragnar’s presence, shrieking as Ragnar scooped him up from behind, the scream turning to a laugh when he realized who it was. Ragnar rubbed his face into Ubbe’s tummy and growled and Ubbe laughed harder. Hvitserk and Sigurd crashed into his legs soon after, demanding to be told what he had seen in the mountains, and then came Aslaug, her pace measured as she stepped through the firelight with Ivar in her arms. Ragnar, still cautious around his boneless son, leaned forward to give Aslaug a kiss on the cheek.

“Aslaug,” he said into her ear, “let’s have daughters.”

“Where have you been?” Aslaug demanded. “I heard you had returned, and then you were not here. There are eleven men with complaints for you to settle and…”

“Ready to be judge?” Ragnar asked Ubbe, who was more interested in playing with his father’s hair. Ragnar could probably teach him to braid soon.

“Ragnar! Attend!”

“I am attending,” Ragnar said. “I am here. I will be here more often in future.”

“There is that, then,” said Aslaug, her face softening.

“I will conduct business in the mornings, and in the afternoons I will go to visit Floki,” Ragnar told her, and decided it was probably best not to say why. Floki was an old friend who he had asked much of recently; it was only right that they be reconciled, and who could say what they might talk of in that time? Aslaug did not need to know it was about another man’s daughter. He leaned close to Aslaug again. “Let’s have daughters.”

“You cannot decide that,” Aslaug said. Ragnar smiled and turned his attention back to his sons.

“Are you so big already?” he asked, making a show of trying to bounce Ubbe and failing. “Go on then - you’re too big to be carried. Show me what you have been doing with your dagger.

“Not before bedtime -“ Aslaug began, but Ragnar had thrown Ubbe forward and he had landed running, and Ragnar had scooped up Sigurd already and tapped him on the nose, asking him how old he was. Aslaug gave up; when Ragnar decided his homecoming was an event, bedtime would cease to matter until the babies started crying.

Ragnar met her eyes over Sigurd’s shoulder, one hand reaching down to rub Hvitserk’s back, and for one moment there was that quiet stillness that Ragnar could put into her, the one that told her he knew her thoughts and could make her his entire world.

Aslaug brought Ivar closer, demanding Ragnar accept him, too, as a son, and Ragnar closed his hand over the baby’s whole head, delighted in its small size.

“Daughters, you say,” Aslaug said to him, as if she did not want one herself.

“Yes,” said Ragnar. “Do we not have enough sons?”

“I thought you would never have enough sons.”

“Enough for now,” Ragnar suggested. “Let us have daughters.”

“Perhaps once the boys are in bed,” Aslaug said, so Ragnar declared to Sigurd that if Sigurd got as big as Ubbe he would have too many sons, and gathered Hvitserk close to plot an ambush for when Ubbe came back, chased one son around the hall while the other two chased him, knocked over three benches, and somehow managed to convince the boys that they wanted to be hiding in their cots while Ragnar stalked around looking for them, ignoring their giggles and declaiming the story of Idunn and Skadi, which somehow featured considerably more of those two women than Aslaug had heard before, and rather less of Loki or Thiazi. Mercifully, he stopped before the part with the goat.

“The boys are in bed,” he announced when he was done. Most of the hall had also dispersed, in between Ragnar’s games and mostly under Aslaug’s direction.

“Yes, they are," said Aslaug, pulling him toward their bed.

“Ubbe is getting quite big.”

“Not as big as you yet.”

“As a jarl,” said Ragnar, “and perhaps as a king, I should send them to be fostered. Ubbe will be old enough soon.” He lay down and pulled Aslaug close. “I do not want to send him away.”

“Don’t send him, then,” Aslaug said, fiddling with the ties on his shirt.

“He should have a good education,” Ragnar said. “With someone loyal. Someone close.”

Aslaug stopped messing with Ragnar’s clothes and pushed away from him. “He’s only four. You have someone in mind.”

“Jarl Ingstad visits regularly,” Ragnar said. “We would not be long separated from our boys.”

“You want your ex-wife to raise our son,” Aslaug said flatly. "All of our sons.”

Ragnar smiled as if she were clever for divining this answer.

“And this is all for the good of our sons?”

“Who else would it be for?”

“Lagertha is lonely.”

Ragnar was silent for a moment and then, as if resetting the conversation onto a track he could understand, he said, “You respect her. She is a good person. She is a good parent. Look what a man Björn has become.”

“He is only called Ironsides because you named him so.”

“I do not see what that has to do with anything.”

“She left today anyway.”

“That is the best part,” Ragnar said. “She cannot take our sons until she comes back.”

The way the seasons turned, Ubbe could be nearly seven before Lagertha took him away - and if anyone else brought up the subject of fostering, they could say they had someone in mind, and would have consult Jarl Ingstad on the matter. That was just the way Ragnar’s mind worked, Aslaug thought: he always had a plan, because he thought of these things years before they came to pass.

“All right,” she agreed. “I will think about it. I do not have to decide until she comes back.”

“No,” Ragnar agreed, and slid a hand over her arm. “And Aslaug?”

“Yes?”

“Any daughters we had would not need fostering.”

 

 


End file.
